“Rebellion is yet the stuff of bliss….”
A womanly life’s a farrago of fortune, her half-seen ladle stubbornly swirling ’round some mysterious solid deep down in catastrophe soup.
Whose bones begin this foaming broth? Those roiling middle decades of sex and men and kids, peppercorns of joy riding the bubbles, familial fulfillment supplying a subtext of garlic while a whiff of lemon warns of betrayals.
Hunched over our cauldrons, we straighten our shoulders, meet the wise gaze of our familiars and then stoop to put on more comfortable shoes. After all, we are scientists and seers, sinners and celebrants. The night is young and it is finally time to dance.
Old women have earned their cronehood, settling these smiling lines into the flesh. We are words of makynge, breaths across the void, wisps of the Shekinah’s earthen perfume.
Behold: with each syllable, the world reappears.
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More Poetry from Kaimana
Carly Mobley (Fishing while the Tide is Out) wrote:In Kaimana Wolff's hands, poetry is royal thaumaturgy that brings the reader face to face with good and evil, whether in fairy tales or life as it is lived, in order to exorcise both poet and reader, affirming a lost agency. The king is dead; the queen 'at home in heaven and hell.'
Carmelo Militano (The Stone Mason's Notebook) wrote:One of the most satisfying books of poetry that I've come across in content, linked insights and verbal brilliance. Should be required reading for all girls of high-school age.
Katje van Loon (glasstown) wrote:The voice is full of yearning and desire as it escapes to exotic locales, the soul aching for wisdom found and lost--and found again. Wit ties it all together, balanced with the sadness of knowledge hard won both inside and outside experience, engaged with fairy tale and myth.
Why do kings fear witches?
Starry-eyed maidens once, they learned what a man's power was. They ran to the woods, to the wolves; they taught themselves true power, drawn from deep within the earth's womb.
Bent crones now, they watch you. Long after the peasants revolt, the witches will be here, spinning their threads, watching your head roll upon the floor. They will be here when the princess takes your throne. They will teach your daughter, as they learned long ago, forever to be cured of kings.